Posts tagged "pure uncut fear"

Dead KORG microKEY, Part 2: Noobface McHamfists Desolders His First SMD

Fri 17 June 2016

Oh God. Oh God. I've been putting this one off, but the stuff has arrived. I can't back down now!

A brief résumé of what happened in Part 1: this great little KORG microKEY MIDI controller stopped powering up for reasons unknown. By wiring it up to a J-Link debug probe, we found that the CPU was still alive and kicking, yet somehow the computer was receiving garbled USB messages. As this keyboard has a built-in USB hub, the stab-in-the-dark diagnosis was that the chip responsible (a Genesys GL850G) had gone bad and needed replacing. Unfortunately, the chip is a 28-pin 10mm*8mm surface mounted design, and our bumbling hero has never before soldered an SMD component, much less reworked a board!

To properly capture the fear of someone doing surface-mount rework for the first time, everything in this piece was written minutes after happening.

Article continues here! KEEP READING, YOU